Create a user onboarding compass – Krystal Higgins workshop – Nov 10

We work hard to get new users. When they come to our digital experiences, we want them to have a great first impression…and, usually, we want them to stick around! That’s where user onboarding comes in. Effective user onboarding guides new folks from first time use to long term commitment, and does so at a meaningful pace.

This workshop will give you practical strategies for designing onboarding that provides value beyond the first run. We’ll look at how to build it like a compass that guides users in different situations to the same destination, instead of as a rigid, disjoint, and hard to maintain flow.

Through a combination of presentation and fun group exercises done with a sample product, you’ll learn how to:

Identify key actions across the user journey that onboarding can support

Break down key actions into modules and scaffold them with guidance

Develop a toolkit of diverse onboarding techniques that fit your product and users

Apply select educational principles to onboarding

This workshop is perfect for beginning to intermediate designers who are just getting started on onboarding design, those currently redesigning an onboarding experience, or anyone interested in building better in-product education.

Facilitator: Krystal Higgins

Krystal is a senior user experience designer who loves tackling complex design challenges. An area she is extremely passionate about is the onboarding of new and existing users. She shares tips for designing in-product education on her design blog and maintains a collection of onboarding reviews from websites, apps, and other products.

In addition to teaching teams about guiding users, Krystal designs all sorts of experiences for web, mobile, and wearable products. She has worked at companies like NVIDIA, eBay, and, currently, Google, where she helped launch Android Wear 2.0 and now works on new opportunities for Google Photos. Krystal rounds out her design work with watercolour painting and scuba diving.